Tomb Raider - The Gate of Times
by ZagorTeNej
Summary: After having met her mother in Helheim and after her good friend and assistant lost his life, Lara is bored and depressed. One day a strange man visits her and tells her about the Gates of Time, the access to which must be destroyed before a malevolent person or group of criminals finds it and use it to destroy the past, present or future of human kind.
1. Chapter 1

**Chapter One**

Although it seemed that Lara finally found the answer to what happened to her mother after many years of searching, Lara could find neither piece nor rest. Now when she could finally leave the baggage of her family's history behind her, she realized that there were some things which were really regrettable during her long career. She did not bear the loss of Mr. Trent easily and lightly, and the loss of Alister almost broke her down. She could never forget that she initiated the events that resulted in his death, and the memory of Alister will forever be smeared by her guilt.

After that terrible experience and visit she paid to her mother in hell, and after Alister was killed by her doppelganger, Lara somehow lost her affinity to adventures and artifacts. Nothing was interesting enough anymore. All she could think of was the price she had to pay for being what she was and the responsibility for forcing Alister to pay her price with his life.

Many months had passed in Lara's attempt to find inner peace, but nothing could seem to help her. Yoga, intensive combat training, travels to most exotic destinations, nothing could unfocus her thoughts from her last adventure in Helheim. Lara also read a lot those days, trying to find anything which could keep her occupied, but even most mysterious books and legends could not keep her attention for more than an hour or two.

Until one day a very strange person paid a visit to her fully renovated and even more splendid mansion in England.

"Strange," Lara thought as she took a long, curious look at this man. All she can conclude about him was that he was male. Even his skin colour was impossible to define. His skin was somewhat grey, and his hair and beard dark, his age was around fifty, although he could be much older.

"Lady Croft, I decided to let Mr. Bing in, because he has excellent recommendations, among which one quite favorable from Lady Chesterton." Winston said, carefully avoiding revealing his real thoughts. He was very worried for Lara ever since she returned from the underworld, as it seems that she was too depressed, which was not at all like her.

"Good day, Lady Croft," the visitor said, bowing down to the tiles in front of her. His eyes seemed amazed to see her.

"What brings you here, Mr. Bing?" Lara asked, not even trying to hide her feeling of boredom. Bing, she thought. The name also meant nothing. It could be Asian, European, even American and African!

"I found something of great importance, your ladyship," the man said and opened his coat to show her a book. "This is a diary of my late grandfather, Jeremiah Carter, he died not six months ago."

She took the notebook he passed to her. "The Jeremiah Carter?"

"Yes, your ladyship."

"For heaven's sake, please call me Lara... Or at least Miss Croft," Lara was already annoyed, which was not bad a sign at all. At least something was happening, Winston thought.

"Miss Croft, you can have the diary and read it later if you want. Let me now give a short explanation of my visit."

After Lara nodded, the visitor continued. "When my grandfather died, I inherited three crates of various papers, diaries, reports, letters... I was very curious and hoped to find treasure maps or such, but all I found were his personal diaries and letters. All logs from his expeditions were missing from his records, I don't know where they ended up. However, this one diary, this one is different. This one was kept during one expedition and there he wrote some things which he did not dare report to the public... A very strange site, or the Gate of Times, as he names it in that diary. You'll see for yourself, he was fascinated and he literally says that one can travel through time if he can command the Gate, and my grandfather thought that he should better cover it up. If it comes into wrong hands, the entire world as we know it could end..."

"What is my part in that story, Mr. Bing?" she asked, still not quite interested, but definitely intrigued. Jeremiah Carter was a great explorer and one of Lara's ideals when she was a teenager.

"Would you like to find that gate and secure it before someone else finds it, someone who is not as benevolent as you, miss Croft?" the man cast a self-confident look at her, not at all upset for her looking like a bored dragon who could fry him at will.

"Do you intend to try a time jump, Mr. Bing?" Lara retorted with her legendary smile.

"Well... My grandfather says that no-one has ever learnt to use the Gate, so, I guess we will also fail to figure out how to operate it... But still, it could be learned, somehow... We don't want to risk a smart criminal who could play with our past... Our goal is to secure it from unauthorized access, not to figure out how to use it."

"Mister Bing," her voice was cold and sharp. "I have met many kinds of people, but rarely a philanthropist."

"I am not a philanthropist, lady Croft," he retorted quickly. "I just want to save this world as it is. I have a family and life here. This is my home. I don't want a lunatic to change our past and present and future, it is in my own interest, too. By accident or by chance, I have a written record of a potential doomsday machine, and I don't want to have it or to have known of it. That's why I brought it to you, to keep it safe. I also brought with me three crates full of other records, in case you want to check for hints or something. They're in my trailer outside..."

"So, you want me to secure the record, and the gate as well, if I understand it correctly?" Lara asked, suddenly very curious.

"Yes. My grandfather never indicated a clear location of the gate, but I am an amateur, after all. Maybe you can figure something out. If you do, maybe you'll want to seal the gate yourself as well... That's all I ask. Keep these records safe and try to figure out what they mean, if they mean anything at all."

Lara accepted. And it helped. When the strange visitor left, she rushed out of her depression and dived into three large crates full of dusty, old papers, notebooks and maps.


	2. Chapter 2

Indeed, what Mr. Bing said was true, Lara realized a couple of days later. She had read the entire diary for three times already, and was quite positive that something important was in question.

 _"_ _I cannot say where we were or what our expedition was,"_ wrote Jeremiah Carter _. "I cannot even say the continent, as the location of this sanctuary must remain secret. Only the people who have true valor and empathy could ever figure out where the sanctuary is, as the selfish and ambitious lack the necessary ability to figure it out. I will tell everything I know about it, but I cannot tell where it is, as it is very, very dangerous._

 _We were on an expedition, looking for something which had nothing to do with what we found. It was an ancient sanctuary, a small temple hidden in a cavern with waterfalls. Sixteen large pillars circle the altar, with a strange copper contraption in its middle. There is a lever on each pillar, but you don't know which one is safe... There are skeletons under each of them. Ancient runes (or similar symbols or letters) could be seen on frescoes and tablets around the temple. I wrote down some of these symbols in my diary, you'll find them on last pages._

 _After we got back to the surface, I asked the people living in nearby villages about their oldest legends. They told me about a brother and a sister who appeared in the wood (just near the cave) out of thin air, dressed in alien clothes, who spoke strange language and claimed that they came from the future. On another occasion, a shepherd with his entire herd disappeared and reappeared ten years later, not a day older, along with his sheep. He claimed that nothing had happened, that he took his sheep out to the field, took a nap, woke up and returned home to see that he was a father of a ten-year-old son. There is also a legend about three riders, dressed in ancient armors and armed with ancient weapon, obviously from a very distant land, who ride into the village totally confused and speaking a language so odd, that no-one could understand it._

 _Also, from what I could find in ancient manuscripts and letters, there is a time portal in this area. People can travel through time if they can open it and use it. It is so treacherous, that no-one wanted to talk about it at all. No-one wanted to write down or forward the secret of using it. But it is there, wide open for anyone to find it... And figure it out..."_

The rest of the confession was similar, Carter described in detail how he tried to decipher the inscriptions, then he listed all the stories and legends with their full content, and even provided a drawing of the sanctuary... Sixteen pillars form a circle... The moment Lara saw the drawing, she knew she had seen this place somewhere... She knew, if she tried to force the memory out to the light, it would take forever. If she gave it a rest, it would soon surface by itself.

So, she read through the entire paperwork of Jeremiah Carter. It took her three following days to sort them all. Letters, invoices from the barber and for electricity, diaries about his beloved Annabel, a mysterious girl who seemed to have died when they were young, diaries he wrote before he died (the most promising ones, Lara realized), ancient court orders and decisions, customs charges and tax returns... It was an entire mountain of papers, revealing an entire life of a human being. All that remains after we leave this world, no matter how famous and adventurous we were, is a pile of papers...

 _"_ _I wish I could return to the gate of times,"_ Carter wrote just a few weeks before he died. _"I would have done some things differently... I would have saved a couple of lives, and most importantly, I would have saved Annabel's life... Why didn't I do it then, when I was there at the gate? Why did it not occur to me that I could go back in time and kept her from going out into that storm? Why was I so honest? No, I was not honest, I was afraid..."_

Lara suddenly jumped from her chair and start walking around her library desk. These words woke up a tide of her own guilt in her and she was incapable of calming it down. What if...? No, she dismissed the thought before even formulating it in her mind. That's crazy! Impossible and totally ridiculous! No... It would be totally immoral... Wouldn't it?

After all, Alister did not have to die at all, his death was totally meaningless and could have been prevented. It was also an unfair fight, because Lara's doppelganger was superhuman combat machine, and Alister was not even a beginner in boss fights and acrobatics. Could his death be prevented? she asked herself even against her will. No, she added quickly, which sounded in her mind as a command to her own self.

She went to bed that evening, but she could not sleep. Around two o'clock, Lara decided to take a swim and maybe get herself tired enough to sleep.

The water of her indoor pool was a bit colder than usual, as the heating system had not yet been installed after the renovation. But it did her nonetheless good. Freshness and tender touch of the water helped her calm her nerves a bit. After she got out of the pool and wrapped herself in a big towel, Lara went upstairs to take a warm shower.

When she returned to her bed one hour later, the first thing that occurred to her was the memory she was looking for... The old pagan temple in a small village in Greece... It was some fifteen years ago, on her vacation after she had beaten professor Willard, and she spent two days there during her long hike through northern Greece towards Khalkidhiki. In the hill behind the village she found an underground temple, in a small cave with waterfall, with sixteen pillars in a circle around a copper bowl and some other gadgets around it. Although this center piece did look quite interesting, the entire sanctuary (or whatever it was) seemed rather dull. Sixteen stone pillars, damaged by moisture and time, but still standing, with no top or any other ornament. Only some inscriptions here and there, and Lara suddenly remembered: it was Aramaic! Jeremiah did not recognize it and did not render it correctly in his diary. It was twisted Aramaic, but Aramaic nonetheless! She remembered how out of place that language seemed to her back then, when she was there the first time. It'll be a piece of cake to decipher the inscriptions once there, she thought.

Although Lara had no idea about it, Winston was right. That peculiar visitor really woke Lara up from her depression, and more important, boredom.


	3. Chapter 3

**Chapter 3**

It was April and weather was warm and dry, almost like summer. When Lara arrived at that village in nothern Greece that morning, it was as always peaceful. Lara decided to go around it and directly to the river and the cave, so he made the left turn at the crossroads on her Ducati and headed towards the hills.

Not a quarter later, she was there. It was silent, as always, invisible for unsuspecting visitors, cleverly hidden behind a hillside. The mouth of the cave was small and concealed by a thick tree and bushes. Lara found it easily and entered the dark cave. It took her a couple of seconds to adjust her gaze to the lack of light, but she was soon able to see around the cave. It was approximately twenty yard wide and thirty yard long, with a waterfall pouring down through an opening in the ceiling, which was the only source of daylight in the small shadowy cave.

In the far corner, through the waterfall, there was a passage that led to another cavern. Lara commando crawled through it and soon stood up in somewhat larger room than the other, with no waterfall this time. sixteen thin stone pillars were circling an altar hidden in the shadow. As Lara approached the sanctuary, she turned on her PSL and took a deep breath. This was what she needed... A smell of an adventure...

Suddenly, she stepped onto a bone that cracked under her boot. Skeletons were all around this place, as if they tried to escape the punishment of pulling the wrong lever... But wait... There was something in the far left corner, she noticed. Lara almost jumped at that surprise. Someone had tried to use the levers more recently than all those dozens of skeletons lying around there for centuries.

Lara shed some light on two skeletons dressed up in contemporary clothes, maybe dead for a couple of years or so. Their clothes were still relatively preserved, which was an exception in the entire scenery. Lara carefully looked through almost decomposed garments and finally found a Beretta, a model which has been in use for more than twenty years. Convenient, she thought.

The next she found was something that looked like a wallet. It was in a bad shape and seemed as if about to disintegrate. Lara carefully opened the wallet and realized that she needs surgical instruments to actually discern anything from the paper brickette inside. But never mind, she'll keep searching... Only ten seconds later she found an old mobile phone in something that used to be a jacket pocket.

She doubted that anyone could ever recover anything from the phone or the card, after all these years and moisture, but she'll take it anyway. Zip constantly proved that she had hired him with a good reason.

After having searched the most recent skeletons, Lara finally stepped inside the circle and approached the altar. It was so strange. Those stone pillars around her were thin and it was simply impossible that they were standing after all those centuries in this wet cave. They were clearly damaged and not so smooth as they used to be, but they were all standing. And the bowl... It was most curious thing of all... It was as clean and shiny as a copper bowl could ever be, as taken care of every single day. But, it was useless to search for the answers now. The reason why she was there was collecting as much information and many clues as possible.

The camera was soon ready in her hands and she made a nice, long video of the entire site. Then she photographed every single corner of the cave, including old and new skeletons, and every inscription and tablet. She even took some samples of the rock used to build the pillars and scanned them as well.

Scanning indicated much greater density in the axis of all these pillars, density of a metal, most probably steel or iron. Like a pencil! Only this time we have rock around steel! Even cold-blooded and icy calm Lara was impressed by this. Three hours later she was satisfied with the material she collected and left the area, promising to return as soon as she figures the gate out.

Three days later, Zip broke her gym session and called her to come to the computer room immediately. Lara was jumping from the ceiling ledge into the small pool below when she heard his voice in the intercom. „I think I found something in the phone... And in the wallet," Zip's voice was garbling in the speaker as she climbed out of the pool.

„Great," she thought. „And I have almost deciphered all those tablets.".

„Hi, Lara," Zip said as soon as he saw her in the grand hall. „It's good that you came immediately. I have something you'd want to see yesterday."

„What did you find in his wallet?" she asked and wrapped her long hair in a towel.

„Not much, but I did get the number and the name of the card holder, although it's ancient. It's Michael York from London, who bought the number and the device in 2006. He was reported missing in 2007 and still not found. However, that is not a proof of identity..."

„I know," Lara replied. „And what did you find in the wallet?"

„Most interesting thing, Lara. I found a card of a person you've heard of... Jeremiah Carter..."

„Now, that's something..." she said. She remembered what Mr. Carter wrote in his diary. He wished he could return to the sanctuary once again and use it to bring back his old love to life. But he couldn't... Why? Did he actually sent those two men to try to figure out the gate? Perhaps without even telling them that pulling the wrong lever is dangerous? After they failed and never returned, he wrote those lines and sadly realized that he had to die to meet his girlfriend. Mr. Carter hires Michael York to figure out the gate. It did sound possible to her.

„Also, I found 3000 pounds in cash and remainings of two credit cards. The chips were sufficiently recoverable, I managed to hack their accounts and here's an interesting twist: Mister Michael York was in debts and had lost his house due to mortgage. Suddenly, he receives a deposit in the amount of 100 000 pounds, which covers all his outstanding debts. Only one month later, he receives another 100 000 pounds on another account, from the same source: Jeremiah Carter. The reason for payment was: house purchase, remuneration for services. Only three months after having received the second instalment, Mr. York was reported missing to Scotland Yard. No-one has ever claimed this cash so far..."

„Jeremiah Carter paid York and sent him to the gate... Michael York had a companion, or at least someone who died with him in that cave."

„I haven't found anything on him yet," Zip shook his head. „However, I did found another thing in his wallet..."

„Indeed?" Lara asked, intrigued more than she was with the Amulet of Horus.

„Look," Zip said and handed over to her a small glassy dish with a piece of paper inside.

Lara took a magnifying glass and glanced at the finding. „Athos Mo..." the handwritten text said, breaking at the edge of the paper.

„I don't know what it means and it's all I could recover from the folded letter from the wallet," Zip said. „I googled around a bit, but all I got were three musketeers and Alexandre Dumas. However, after having read everything Dumas ever wrote when I was a teenager, I can with certainty confirm that he never wrote anything about Greece."

„I know what it means," Lara said suddenly. „Athos, a semi-island on Khalkidiki in Greece."

„Well, in that case, it could be totally irrelevant. Maybe it's a motel in which poor Mr. York spent a night before he died."

„No, Mo... does not stand for 'motel' but for 'mountain'," she replied. „And there are no motels on that mountain. That's not a place to visit by chance or for fun."

„What kind of mountain is it?"

„It's a semi-island, Zip," Lara retorted patiently. „It's an area closed for tourists, it belongs to the Greek church, there are some 50 monasteries there, and no-one visits this area except for spiritual reasons. The monks are pretty isolated from the outside world and prefer to keep it that way for good."

„Well, then it must be important... When will you want to go there, I can book you a flight..."

„No," Lara said. „I cannot go there. It's one of those rare places in the world which I cannot explore."

Zip cast a puzzled look at Lara.

„They don't allow women to visit the Holy Mountain of Athos, Zip," Lara explained and took the flash memory from him. Reaffirming the towel on her head, she turned and left out into the main hall and went up the stairs to change into something dry.


End file.
